The Eight Mountains

Paolo Cognetti’s novel is the story of a friendship. The friendship between Pietro and Bruno. And it is the story of a mountain. The two children meet in the village of Grana, where Bruno lives and where Pietro goes with his family every summer. As the years go by, the two friends drift apart, moving away from each other but then coming back together. And yet the bond between them remains the same, cemented by their shared experiences, such as their explorations of crests and streams during their childhood and the construction of a hut by the lake, an enterprise that marks their transition into adulthood. Pietro lives in the city and has a complicated relationship with the mountains. He is not a man of the mountains but moves between Milan and Grana, between two worlds he views as opposites. The idyll that he seeks when he abandons his city life is for Bruno the everyday reality of hard work and freezing cold winters, far removed from any idyll. So the mountain, too, is a protagonist in the story, not just the backdrop for a coming-of-age novel, but a living place that changes following its own time, which is not the time of humans. A mountain to which Pietro will never fully belong, even though it is at the centre of his life, with all the other peaks that he will never stop exploring rising up all around.   Le otto montagne Paolo Cognetti Einaudi, 2016